Formatting External Harddrive Mac OSX

[Craig F]

Originally Posted by the blast

A good friend of mine said to make sure & format an external drive for use with Pro Tools as Mac OSX Extended & NOT Journaled. Can any of you confirm this? Thanks. -john

I will confirm that your friend is wrong.

He was right when Journalling was added to the OS around when 6.4 was out but, w/ 6.9 Journaling is recommended.

DO NOT use case sensitive.

Also turn Spotlight Indexing off


From the Sticky:
Compatibility

Verify you are using a supported Mac and your system meets all of the minimum requirements. You can find compatibility information in the Support section of the website:
www.digidesign.com/support

Choose from the product list for compatibility information, and click on the links in the compatibility section for each product for additional information.

- Verify that you have the Minimum or Suggested amount of Ram loaded in your system:
For current Pro Tools systems, that is the following:
1 GB (1024 MB) or more highly recommended. The best user experience has been reported using 2 GB or more, especially when using software instruments.
- Verify that your version of the Mac OS is supported with your version of Pro Tools:
Pro Tools LE Version Compatibility Grid for Mac OS X
More Information:
Mac OS X 10.4 Requirements with Pro Tools 6 & 7
Mac OS X 10.2 & 10.3 Requirements with Pro Tools 6

- Make sure all drives are formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with OS X’s Disk Utility. Pro Tools can not use UFS or HFS volumes. If the drive was originally formatted in OS 9 or with any other application, backup the drive and reinitialize it with Disk Utility. More information:
Hard Drive Requirements - Pro Tools LE for Mac OS X
- If you are on a PowerPC (PPC) Mac, you cannot record to a GUID partitioned drive (which is typically the partition type for Intel based Mac boot/OS drives). You must reformat the drive as Apple Partition Map. APM formatted drives can be used for recording with both PPC and Intel based Macs.

IMPORTANT! You MUST use a secondary hard drive (not your main OS drive) for recording and playback of audio in Pro Tools. Recording or playback from the OS drive is known to be problematic and the cause of many different error types. If you are using your system drive and encountering errors, the first thing you should do is get a compatible drive.

Pro Tools supports recording and playback to a secondary drive that meets the following requirements:

7200 rpm or faster
9ms seek time or faster

Firewire drives must have the Oxford 911 (FW400 port), Oxford 912 (FW400 & FW800 ports) or Oxford 924 (FW800 ports) Bridge chip. Other Oxford chipsets, while not fully tested, have not shown any issues and should generally work well with Pro Tools.

USB drives are not supported and are known to be problematic. Avoid using USB drives, as they are known for causing a variety of errors.

[BRH]

Originally Posted by the blast

A good friend of mine said to make sure & format an external drive for use with Pro Tools as Mac OSX Extended & NOT Journaled. Can any of you confirm this? Thanks. -john

Unjournaled is old ...back with OSX9...Tell your friend to get with it!

[lemonkid]

it USED to be with PT 5 or 4 or something. But now journaled is advised.

[RachelFoxxFilms]

Hey guys- I've done all the above and when in Workspace still get a pop-up: "cannot be designated as an Audio Record volume because it is not a valid audio volume". So now what? Is it the drive? Are there drives specific to audio record and playback functions? Is it Pro Tools?